All You Need Is Love

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

I’ve been thinking in terms of grand, declarative statements:  Writing fiction is an act of love.  Fiction depends upon empathy.  Writing fiction is a moral act.  Fiction is amoral.  Fiction is true.  Fiction depends on lies.  Beauty is truth, and truth, beauty. Etc.

I’ve been thinking of short stories with clear, dramatized change: “Araby” by James Joyce; “How Far She Went” (Mary Hood); “Roman Fever” (Edith Wharton); “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner.  I’ve been remembering, and re-reading, stories with unsympathetic main characters and /or situations of rape, drug abuse, murder:  Denis Johnson’s “Work” and Grace Paley’s “The Little Girl”; Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything that Rises Must Converge” and Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain.”

I’ve been doing all this because, in three days, I’m giving a talk as part of this summer’s  Fiction Intensive at U.C. Berkeley Extension.  A few weeks ago, as I agreed to give the Monday lecture, a small voice in the back of my head asked, “And when will you prepare?” Another said, “Go for it, you’ll figure out what to say later.”

So that’s what I’ve been (and still am) doing: figuring out what to say.

At a meeting with Liz McDonough, the director of the writing program at Extension, and Laurie Ann Doyle, my co-instructor for the week, I heard myself name the topic.  What Is Fiction?

Gentle laughter ensued.  What is fiction, indeed?  Better minds than mine have written tomes on the topic.  A quick Google search leads on to a scarily reductive definition on a website “by students for students,” in which fiction is defined as “that which is not true.”

More on that in a minute.

At first, I’d intended to address the issue of unlikeable characters.  A writer friend of mine recently finished his novel. For a few months now, his agent has been sending the manuscript around.  One editor, who gave much praise, declined, offering by way of explanation, “We just didn’t love Ed.”  Ed is a key character in the book, one of three main characters.  Yeah, he’s a bit of a jerk—self-absorbed, haughty, manipulative, flawed.  Human, in other words. Who among us isn’t?

Can you imagine saying, by way of turning down Moby-Dick or Lolita or Portrait of a Lady, We just didn’t love Captain Ahab? Or Humbert Humbert?  Or Madame Merle?  Of course we don’t like them – because that’s really what the editor meant, I think.  But love?  That’s a different matter.

We love plenty of people who are unlikeable, who do awful things.  Why should fiction be any different?  Isn’t love the ability to see the whole person, to catch a glimmer of the longing and pain in even the most despicable behavior?

Fiction doesn’t depend upon bad guys turning good, on happy-ever-after endings.  It does depend upon some satisfying change, or shift, or reversal—some way in which the conflict reveals and transforms character, and yes, truth.

A cynical book critic gets shot in the head and, in the infinitesimal flash of memory before he dies, revisits a moment of pure joy in language.  A petty, resentful son wishes the worst on his mother and when it happens, realizes how much he needs her.  A boy romanticizes a neighbor girl on whom he has a crush, goes to great effort to join her at a fair, and, confronted with her silly ways, sees his idealism as vanity.

These plots have in common the traditional demand of story:  conflict, crisis, resolution.  They rely on metanoia, a Greek word used by Aristotle to refer to the rhetoric device of character reversal and by writers of the Christian gospels to signal repentance.

As Roman Catholics, Tobias Wolff, Flannery O’Connor, and James Joyce—writers of the stories I’ve just summarized—have a worldview steeped in narrative and myth based on notions of sin and redemption, on revelation of the divine through human action, on salvation through grace.

Or, if you prefer less religiously fraught language:  brokenness and healing; seeing what has been hidden; confronting ourselves and one another; just deserts.  Not punishment as punishment alone, but as completion.

So perhaps the question isn’t What Is Fiction, but what is love?

 

 

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Out of the Faith Closet

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

When I started blogging, a little more than a year ago, I did so as an exploration of social media as a tool to reach my readers, to “build my brand” as a writer.  I was curious about (and a little intimidated by) the opportunities and challenges of blogging.  I had never logged onto Facebook or Twitter, and all my Friends were people I’d met and talked to in person. I’d also always thought writing a regular column (aka blog) would be fun. So I signed up for Meghan Ward’s social-media class at the S.F. Writers’ Grotto.  If I could reach a few more readers, all the better.

A year later, I visit Facebook – not as often as Meghan suggested, but often enough.  I post weekly to this blog, and I even tweet (though, again, not as often as successful brand-building might warrant).  But here’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed:  of all the posts I’ve put up—and this week, I reach number 51—I’ve left out what some might see as a key element of my “brand.”

In Meghan’s class, one of our assignments was to make a list of fifty possible blog topics.  We also listed possible topics for one another.  Of the list I made, religious subjects appeared a few times.  Of the list my classmates made, they dominated, Why a Virgin Birth? and What Are You Praying For Now? being two of the topics suggested.

Both questions make me shudder, for the same reason that in more than a year of blogging, I’ve scarcely mentioned the words prayer, God, faith, spiritual, or religious.  True, my bio states that I’m at work on a nonfiction “exploration of spirituality and sex” and my memoir covers, as its subtitle makes clear, a skeptic’s journey into prayer.

One of the topics on my own list is What I Would Never Write About, and when I consider writing on it, I’ve never thought of faith.  After all, I have written about faith, in the afore-mentioned memoir.  When I think of topics I’d never write about, I imagine those that would hurt people I love: a confidence a friend told me, a revelation that is not mine to reveal, etc.  Deborah the Closet Monster posted, a few weeks back, on how she considers some topics off-bounds for her blog.  For posting, she clarified—not for writing.  This distinction is an important one, the same as we discussed last week in my writers’ group when E, writing an essay about her husband’s failing health, admitted not wanting to go into details that would pain him if & when the piece gets published.  “Write it anyway,” we advise—easier said than done, when you’re breaking a taboo (or a confidence), but as any writer knows, necessary.

But those aren’t the taboos I’m talking about now.  When we blog, we create a persona.  We—or at least I—want to keep certain things from public view.  I post a honeymoon picture on my FB Profile, where Friends (of the know-in-person variety) can see it, but not on my Fan Page.  Where we went on honeymoon has nothing to do with my brand as a writer, after all.  But why would I hide that I miss going to church on Sundays since Sunday became the only day to sleep past eight?  That I miss communion with a deep longing and deep hunger that has surprised me?  That I read the psalm appointed to Morning Prayer every day?  I wrote a whole book on prayer, so why the evasion?  My faith is a part of my personal life, yes—just like the photos from our honeymoon—and it’s also part of my brand.

At some level, I’m not comfortable being seen as a “spiritual writer.”  I’ve had people write to me who, having read my memoir, want Part II.  One man went so far as to say, in so many words, Well of course your next book will be spiritual.  How can it not be?

Yes, I might have responded, all my writing is spiritual—but I’m not sure he and I would have defined the adjective in the same way.  One of the reasons I chose the publisher I chose for my memoir had to do with the fact that the other interested party wanted me to say more about “my love affair with Jesus”—the kind of language that had made me a skeptic in the first place.  Don’t call me a religious writer.  I’m just a writer who has written about prayer.

And yet, maybe what I’m hearing right now—from myself or from (yes) God—is that it’s time to stop drawing such distinctions.  What am I afraid of?  Why not blog about something I wrote—and published—a book about?

What side of yourself have you revealed in your writing and then found yourself feeling protective about?  When readers put labels on us we don’t want, do they define us?  Is a “brand” something that can change?

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Playtime

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

I read with interest Gina Gionfriddo’s article in last Sunday’s New York Times about her new play’s “inadvertent homage” to Wendy Wasserstein’s Heidi Chronicles.  Gionfriddo’s play Rapture, Blister, Burn—which opened this week at Playwrights Horizons, the same theater where Heidi had its premiere in 1988—features a 40-something female academic with a successful writing career and second thoughts about her personal life.

I saw Heidi Chronicles in New York when I was in my late twenties and, like many women, felt it could have been written just for me.  Like Gina Gionfriddo, I too share Wasserstein’s “certain temperament…that makes you feel gray next to the bouncy people at the your gym.”  That’s part of why, growing up in sunny California, I became convinced that I’d been born on the wrong coast.  Moody, melancholic, and introspective,  I preferred books like Jane Eyre to (god forbid) volleyball on the beach.  After college, I moved back east as soon as I could.

But I digress.  Sort of.  I didn’t start this post to write about identifying with Heidi Holland—an identification that Gionfriddo, in her piece last week, suggests comes more from shared gender as well as the aforementioned shared temperament than from age or era.  Yes, it’d be nice to live in New York so I could rush out to see Gionfriddo’s play on its own merits, and I’ll cross my fingers that Rapture, Blister, Burn comes to the Bay Area (hello, Berkeley Rep?), but what grabbed me in Gionfriddo’s article was how refreshed I felt after reading it.  It got me thinking about plays again.

Years ago–fifth grade, actually–I wrote a few plays.  Later, in junior high and then in high school, I moved onto narrative prose (of the detail-heavy overly descriptive kind) and poetry (of the Plath-inspired, clove-cigarette-saturated variety).  But when I was ten, I wrote plays called A Christmas Play and A Play About Friendship.  Sentimental as the titles sound, both had a dark side.  Friendship, for example, portrayed a betrayal—no doubt influenced by my humiliation when Jenny Waters announced my crush on David Kennedy during a game of hopscotch, a moment that helped form me into the writer (and woman) I became.  I found, if not revenge, then catharsis in gathering a small group of friends at recess, assigning roles, passing around a script, and acting out what I’d written.

Gionfriddo’s piece last Sunday caught my eye as I flipped through the Arts & Leisure section in part because of the photo.  Her baby on her shoulder, what looks like Central Park (that is, trees) in the background, her expression wry and tired and intelligent, she looks refreshingly real–smart, a little tired, with a wry sense of humor.  I liked what she wrote–not just about Heidi and her own play, but the  syntax and music of her sentences, the voice.  I want to hear that voice spoken on stage, read it on the page.

A page or two later, I came across Christopher Isherwood’s article about “some of the finest new playwriting” happening now.  With words like “illuminate,” “lyrical,” “pinpoint accuracy,” “symphonic,” “delicacy,” “inspired and unexpected,” and, yes, “very funny,” Isherwood describes the subtle dramatic power of recent plays by Amy Herzog and Stephen Karam.  I’m working on a novel right now, attempting to calibrate a believable and unexpected narrative arc, so when I read how “Ms Herzog turns [the moment of revelation] on its head” in a scene “so beautifully executed and so unpredictable, that it makes the moment of connection more moving than it might be if it were handled more conventionally,” I lifted my hand and ripped the page down the fold.  Another clip for the files.

Or better yet, for the already cluttered desk, where I’ll see it both pieces more often and be reminded, as a fiction writer and creative-writing instructor, to look to other forms for communion, for emotional authenticity, for a tonic.  I’ll read more plays, see more plays.  And, maybe, one day, write one again.

What genres have you left behind, only to return to?  What other modes have inspired you?  What has made you look anew at elements of storytelling?

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Finding Time

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

My computer has iCal.  I’ve carried around a pink-leather Filofax for ten years.  The iCal shows more detail and goes farther into the future, but I can’t give up the physical object.  Not only do I love the cheerful pink, but certain appointments merit writing in both places or I’m likely to forget.  As for Siri, pinging or ringing or whatever Siri does, to remind me—no, thanks.  I don’t even have a smart phone.

Some time ago—I suppose it says something that I can’t remember when or why—I stopped wearing a watch.  I don’t miss it, and I’m (usually) still on time.  Even an old-fashioned clamshell cell phone can tell me the time.

So, yes, I have a somewhat inconsistent approach to scheduling.  For several days now, I’ve been wanting to sit down and make a schedule for the summer.  My summer classes start tomorrow, and I fear my writing time getting sucked away if I don’t plot out the hours and stick to them.   With three writing classes, the time spent reviewing and grading student papers can take as much as I give—and then some.  I have to be rigorous.  Not chary or withholding, just intentional.  Too often, on a day I’m looking for a distraction from the novel, I’ll spend four hours on student work that otherwise might take only two. So, my logic goes, if I draw up and keep to a schedule…

Yes, I know.  The best-laid plans and all that.  I’ve been balancing teaching and writing for more than a decade, so I’m hardly in a new situation.  And yet it feels new, so much so that I fear losing hold on time.  Since I took the sublet across town, I’m no longer sitting at the desk at 8 a.m. and stopping at noon.  My commute no longer consists of walking down the hall in my slippers and flipping open the laptop.  Now, I drive for 25 minutes along congested streets—after I’ve showered, dressed, and packed a lunch.  Some days, I stop at the pool for a swim on the way, which means sitting down to work as late as last Tuesday’s 11:47 a.m.  But once there, I can work until three or four.  I get started later, but I clock in more hours overall.

So what’s the problem?  Does when we write matter?  For me, it has.  I was in grad school when I first drew up a weekly schedule, hour by hour, Monday through Friday.  Determined to maintain fifteen hours of writing time a week while teaching and keeping up with my own courses, I made a chart, complete with colored pencils. When I look back, I recall leisurely mornings of writing time.   I recall productivity.

That’s what I’m hoping for, this summer.  I know I can’t start first thing, not if I have to drive across town.  But I do want to go to sleep each night knowing, come morning, just how soon I’ll start writing.  I’ve tried the other way:  inventing each day as it arrives.  Seeing what I feel like, assessing what needs doing and going from there.

It doesn’t work.  I need routine.  Playing it by ear is great on the weekends or on vacation, but even then I tend to spend time at lunch planning (or at least talking about) what to do for dinner.  Like most self-employed writers/artists/filmmakers/etc, I need structure.  Structure makes for security in an otherwise completely insecure profession.  I may never finish this novel.  I may never sell it.  I may never figure out how to end this chapter.  But I know, come next Monday at 9 a.m., where I’ll be working.  My (home) office might be a mess, my spices out of alphabetical order, my unread issues of Poets and Writers and AWP Chronicle stacked precariously in a pile about to fall over—but if I’m writing every day at (more or less) the same time, I can live with the rest.  Quite happily.

Where do you find security in your writing life?  When do you allow exceptions to your writing schedule, and what habits help (or hinder)?

 

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Done Yet?

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

When people ask me what I’m working on these days, I tell them the truth: my novel.  And then I get cagey.  Questions inevitably follow, questions like, “How’s that going?” Or “the same one?”  Or “Must be about done by now, huh?”

The fact is, I’ve thought it done a few times now.  First, about (gulp) ten years ago, when I wrote what seemed to me the most achingly beautiful ending I could imagine.  (When you start to think of your own sentences as achingly beautiful, watch out.)  My trusted readers didn’t get the imagery, and pointed out a few other problems, too.  Then life (specifically, major depression) intervened, and when I got back to writing, I decided to work on a memoir.  After the memoir was finished, and published, I went back to the novel and revised it.  I sent it to my agent and waited.  And waited.  Some four months later, I got an answer by email.  “Sorry. Too quiet.”  I waited a few days and called her for something a little more specific, a tad more precise.  Wasn’t Gilead quiet?

The market’s just so hard right now, she said.  She doesn’t want to go out with something she can’t be 100 percent excited about.  Etc.  I hadn’t expected her to say it was perfect—although I wouldn’t have complained if she had—but I had hoped for a little more engagement.  Maybe something like, You know, it really loses momentum around page 50.  Or We never understand the main character’s motivation, or Can you tweak the middle hundred pages?  I was disappointed to learn not only that my agent had passed on the novel, but that she had no investment in my making it better.

I read a statistic a while back, in reference to writers and rejection, about how women writers tend to retreat after hearing “No,” even what I call a “nice No” (when an editor asks to see more).  Most women don’t submit again.  Men, on the other hand, do.

Now I’m breaking from responsible reporting here by not citing the source (although it had something to do with a VIDA conference, I think), so you’ll have to take it as anecdotal.  I did.  Because it made total sense to me.  Whether because I’m female, or because of what some mean teacher once said to me, or because the stars were aligned a certain way on the day I was born (or conceived)—it doesn’t matter the reason—I retreat after rejection.  I’m not one of those to get back on the horse.

So getting back to the novel took some time.  Another trusted reader looked at it and gave me wonderfully, specific, illuminating suggestions.  I took notes.  And, last summer, I rewrote the first chapter, showed it to my writers’ group.  They were so enthusiastic that I felt compelled to keep going, which I’ve done. This time, I’ve made big changes.  No more tweaking of sentences here and there; now I’m cutting whole chunks and writing new material to “forefront the drama” as a grad student might say.

About a week ago, I hit a snag. A big snag.  I’d set all my people in motion, poised to act—and now they needed to act.  But how?  I put them in the same room, the same bar, the same scene.  Now what? I went out for coffee.  I checked email.  I wrote a few options, which felt like swimming in wet cement.  I listened to the voices in my head, some of which said “Take a break” and others of which announced “You have to sit with the anxiety.”  Ultimately, I had to get up and shut down the laptop or I’d be late for the dentist.

That was two days ago.  I fear repeating the past—taking a break that ends up a year-long retreat.  I’m determined, this time, to force my way through.  Yes, I’ve told myself that perhaps this is the novel meant to live in a drawer.  (Every fiction writer has one, right?)  I’ve told myself that I’m no longer the same woman who began the novel X many years ago, and therefore my initial impetus has dried up, my motivation lost its drive.  But I can’t stop thinking about the characters.  So I’ll push through.  Maybe not today, but Monday.

What longterm project do you keep returning to?  Have you given up on something only to return later?  How do you respond to rejection? How do you know when to walk away—or not?

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